It’s Gordon Munster — and he’s got a bolt loose
THE Remain campaign is beginning to resemble The Night Of The Living Dead, as the crypt doors creak open and another former Prime Minister is disinterred. Last week, it was the turn of Tony Blair and John Major to emerge from beyond the grave to warn that the Irish Troubles will kick off again in earnest if we vote Leave.
Major has always had a ghostly pallor and these days Blair looks as if he’s been embalmed. Call Me Dave seems to be heading the same way, judging by his zombie-like appearance on The Andrew Marr Show at the weekend.
Boy George behaves like Igor, the crazed laboratory assistant, frantically twiddling dials and fiddling with his Bunsen burner in an increasingly desperate attempt to pump new life into the Remain monster.
Yesterday, Gordon Brown was given a Frankenstein-style jolt of electricity and let loose on an unsuspecting electorate. Unfortunately, mission control forgot to check the wiring and tighten the bolt in his neck before unlocking his cage.
Gordon lumbered into BBC Radio 4’s Today programme studio like Herman Munster, circuit board set to ‘transmit only’.
Despite the best efforts of John Humphrys, he went straight into Just A Minute mode, determined to speak without hesitation or interruption. Pity he forget the bit about deviation and repetition.
Soon, Gordon was in interstellar overdrive, gabbling on about ‘wind and wave power’, ‘global financial recession’, ‘climate change’ and the need to ‘be at the table’. Was there a point here? Humphrys tried to get Brown to address the burning issue of immigration, the number one reason why traditional Labour supporters are flocking to the Leave camp.
After Labour abolished border controls, the population rocketed to 65 million — an increase of five million since 2001.
When Brown was Chancellor, Labour said laughably that annual migration from Eastern Europe would be no more than 13,000. How’s that working out, then?
Yet when Humphrys challenged him on the overall figures, Gordon went off at a tangent — merely quoting the total number of Bulgarians and Romanians who settled here in the period 2007/8, as if that’s got anything to do with the prix de poisson.
The real problem, he insisted, was illegal immigration, not the millions of EU passport holders who have the unfettered right to settle in Britain and are putting such intolerable pressure on housing and public services.
LATER, Gordon went on to talk about the ‘patriotic’ British people who wanted to lead in Europe, not leave. Lead not leave, geddit? You could get on the radio with stuff like that. This is the man who labelled Labour voter Gillian Duffy a ‘bigoted woman’ when she dared to question him about the scale of Eastern European migration. His outburst only confirmed what we already suspected — that Labour’s leadership despises the opinions of its traditional supporters.
Labour has always given the impression it equates any kind of British patriotism with racism and Far-Right extremism.
Some of you may have heard the Today programme, or seen Gordon on TV yesterday. What might have escaped your attention is a bizarre video featuring him wandering through the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, like a deranged version of historian David Starkey.
‘Bombed and destroyed by Nazi war planes 75 years ago and now painstakingly and lovingly maintained as a monument to wars that we have left behind and to the sanctuary of peace,’ he declares. ‘We have a Europe where decisions are made by dialogue, discussions and debate. A Europe at peace because of what Britain did.
‘We are the British people who gave Europe the greatest statement of human rights . . .’
Quite who this is aimed at, or what it is supposed to achieve, is unclear. Anyone trying to convince the British people to remain in the EU would do well to steer clear of the vexed question of ‘ human rights’ — which has become a charter for foreign criminals and illegal immigrants and means we have no power to deport them.
Actually, anyone trying to convince us to stay in the EU would have been best advised to keep Gordon in his box.
Some of us have long memories. Brown’s record on Europe is a litany of dishonesty and betrayal. OK, he kept us out of the single currency, but that was only so he could retain control of the economy and use the Treasury as a rival powerbase to Blair.
As Chancellor, he sold off Britain’s gold reserves at car-boot-sale prices and invested 40 per cent of the proceeds in the doomed-to-failure euro, costing us billions. He also conspired with Blair to surrender half our hard-won EU budget rebate.
In 2005, he stood for re-election on a manifesto which promised a referendum on any significant European treaty changes.
But when he became Prime Minister, he reneged on the referendum promise and sneaked through the back door to sign the Lisbon Treaty, which gave away Britain’s right of veto in 70 areas and made the charter of fundamental rights a non-negotiable condition of membership.
JUST as well Call Me Dave didn’t ask Gordon to back his scare story about old-age pensions collapsing if we vote Leave. It was Brown who single-handedly mounted a vindictive tax raid on private pension funds to pay for his bloated client state.
In the process, he destroyed final salary schemes and condemned millions to a seriously diminished income in retirement.
That’s why I dubbed him The Man Who Stole Your Old Age.
Sending for Gordon Brown to shore up the struggling Remain campaign is a bit like Roy Hodgson recruiting his hapless predecessor Steve McClaren — the Wally With The Brolly — to rescue England’s stuttering start to the European football championships.
If Planet Fear think his intervention will sway Labour voters, I’m afraid they’ll be sorely disappointed. In Labour’s heartlands, people are having to live with the everyday reality and cultural upheaval of mass immigration and survive on low wages driven down still further by cheap foreign workers.
That’s why so many of them voted Ukip at the last General Election. It’ll take more than a procession of Undead ex-Prime Ministers to persuade them otherwise.
Igor, come quickly, the monster has escaped . . .